Research strategyfor the buildingand construction sector

Welcome

Welcome to the website for the Building a Better New Zealand

A successful and innovative building and construction industry is critical to New Zealand as we look to provide the homes, work places and communities that will secure firm foundations for our future. We also face the distinct challenge and opportunity of rebuilding one of our largest cities, Christchurch. New ideas and solutions will be needed as a generation of work re-shapes much of the city’s buildings and infrastructure. Similarly Auckland will undergo significant change over the next few decades as its population grows by 40% from its current 1.34 million to 2.5 million by 2040.

Aligned strongly with the New Zealand Building Research Strategy the conference brought together local and international speakers to share their knowledge and insights on innovative, high performance and low impact approaches to developing, maintaining and retrofitting the built environment.

Spanning policy, planning and design, through to construction, maintenance, refurbishment, reuse or deconstruction, the focus of the conference was on the future of New Zealand’s built environment and how to transform the building sector to deliver on the needs of future New Zealand...Read more

This Building a Better New Zealand research strategy has been developed by BRANZ, the Construction Industry Council (CIC), the Construction Strategy Group (CSG) and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). It follows extensive conversations throughout 2012 with industry and government.

You may notice some similarities between Building a Better New Zealand and other strategies. This is because Building a Better New Zealand is intended to complement other existing industry strategies and present them in a whole of industry context.

A core part of developing and maintaining the Industry Research Strategy is the comprehensive industry needs survey of key businesses, organisations and individuals across the building and construction sector, undertaken biennially.

Last carried out in early 2012, the survey contacted almost 10,000 people from across the entire industry and a total of 2,405 responses were received, an excellent response rate of just under 25%.

The survey will be of interest to businesses, professional organisations and policy makers. As well as having played an important role in shaping Building a Better New Zealand, the survey is also a comprehensive and valuable resource in its own right.

Research Roadmaps – best aligning resources to priorities

As part of the development of Building a Better New Zealand thought has also been given the role that Roadmaps could play in setting out a more strategic approach around the research needs to key areas or themes.

The ambition is to develop Roadmaps that set out clear programmes of research across each of the Agenda areas, where industry has an appetite to do this. These would have medium-longer term horizons and schedules of work (a minimum of five years).

More specialist Roadmaps might also be developed that drill down in to particular parts of an Agenda theme area – for example to establish a programme in a more distinct area (like fire research, prefab).

Each Roadmap would establish research priorities and where possible prioritise these, ideally setting out the inter-relationships between research (for example, how one area of work should precede another) and their relationships with other key developments (for example, industry, policy or legislative changes).

The Roadmaps would then serve as a broad consensus about key areas of work, this in turn would act as a framework and catalyst for resource programming (eg: capability needs) and investment decisions (eg: prioritisation of funding).